In another video, Marian Bartlett, a founder of Emotient and the company's lead scientist, explains how it works.

"It takes an image as input, and it scans that image for faces," she says. "And as soon as it finds those faces, it then does pattern recognition techniques in order to measure and detect the facial expressions in those faces."

Here's a clip from another video that shows how the technology can instantaneously recognize the emotions of individuals within a group:

One of Emotient's promo videos explains that this technology can be used for a variety of purposes: advertisers can use it to gauge how people feel about an ad or a new product, media companies can use it to measure audience response to a movie or TV show, and retailers can use it to measure how people feel about a certain "retail experience."

Emotient also says it can be used in healthcare to measure how a patient is feeling.

Apple could use Emotient's tech for all of these things: its iAd platform could benefit from better sentiment analysis, its retail arm could use it to analyze people's shopping experiences at the Apple Store, and the marketing and sales teams could use it to gauge how well a particular advertisement is performing with the public. The ability to analyze emotions could also benefit Apple's other AI products like Siri or its Photos app — perhaps you could ask your iPhone to "show only happy photos" and it could show you only photos with smiling people in them.

Apple did not return a request for comment on Thursday. Ken Denman, Emotient's president and CEO, did not immedietly return a request for comment.